Tag: One Life To Live

“The group spent nearly three years and more than $10 million trying to revive two canceled daytime dramas, “All My Children” and “One Life to Live,” that ran for four decades on the ABC television network.”

Prospect Park has been accused, by some soap fans, of not fully committing to bringing back the two popular soaps. This article details the impressive measures producers Jeff Kwatinetz and Rich Frank took to revive to long-loved favorite shows. To use these shows to launch a completely online network was a bold and creative move and I wish it worked. Both shows seemed to prove that they could hold an audience by posting big numbers while airing on HULU with AMC becoming the highest rated show on Oprah’s OWN network when OWN also aired both showqaqwqq2s.

Unfortunately, between a lack of much needed nd the ongoing lawsuit with ABC over alleged sabotage both soaps are gone for good. Prospect park was my last hope, as a soap fan, that recently canceled fan-favorite daytime dramas could make a come back and that the remaining dramas would have a home in the future when/if they are canceled.

I am looking forward to seeing what comes from Prospect Park, once it rebounds – and I have not doubt that it will.

TSJ’s last day filming for the show was late July (the 22nd). The entire time I’ve been hoping that TPTB released the information to throw fans off track (much like the ‘Todd’s execution scenes when, I believe, TSJ’s contract was up and TPTB kept us guessing about whether or not he would return. At time moves on, I realize that it’s utterly hopeless to believe that TPTB are playing a waiting game and I realize that RH’s Todd has indeed won out. While I’d preferred having both men onscreen, it’s clear that RH’s Todd had to win out. Bummer, but I accept it will adjust.

Bummer? Yes, bummer. I’ve been adamant that I want TSJ to be declared the ‘real Todd’ while keeping RH’s Todd on as the newly discovered brother brainwashed into believing he was Todd Why? Although it took me a while to warm up to him, I’ve been a huge TSJ supporter since Todd’s “death row” storyline. It’s one of the most ethereal, hauntingly beautiful, storylines OLTL writers have offered. A rapist, who later became a rape survivor, is on death row after being convicted of killing his assailant. I think TSJ added an intangible quality to the role that RH’s Todd didn’t have.

Rather than build on the magnificence of that storyline and send Todd on a journey of introspection, OLTL writers took the opportunity to make Todd meaner, angrier, and more vile with each act -primarily to prop other characters and storylines. TSJ’s Todd was sacrificed to sell Cole and the Starr as a burgeoning supercouple and the writers wasted no time in taking TSJ’s Todd to a new low (battering Cole, knocking a pregnant Starr down a flight of stiars, threatening to kill orphaned adolescents, bullying Starr’s friends, etc).

Todd had become such a heinous character that OLTL writers wasted months creating a new ‘high school musical’ around the “eternal” love of Starr and Cole, with Todd being cast as evil personified. Much of Langston’s play centered around the heartlessness of a man like Todd, who’d lost the ability to recognize and bask in the glow of true love. When an entire town’s collective life revolves around a high schol musical on the glory of teen love/pregnancy as a lesson about love for the ages? Your show and its characters are doomed. I think the show for far too long leveraged its credibility on the backs of its youngest performers (not their fault at all) in the hopes of bringing in newer/younger viewers — and as has always been true of daytime, younger viewers are as uninterested in hot mess storyline about their lives as the rest of us. It didn’t stop TSJ’s Todd from becoming a causalty and beginning the downward spiral toward irrelevance.

Like RH before him, TSJ’s portrayal of the character became one of boredom and he began projecting ‘shorthand’ acting. His responses became quick quips. Facials expressions (plural) became facial expression (singular). The return of Marty Saybrooke was the death of TSJ’s Todd Manning. His struggle for redemption – post Marty’s rape (the first time) was gone. His sad realization that he would never be able to make up to Marty, or the community he offended and terrorized, for his actions was gone. His struggle to forgive himself for what he’d become, was gone.

The writers, I can only guess, felt that they’d found the one sure fire way of giving all of that back to fans. RH’s Todd gets a fresh start. If he becomes ‘Real Todd’, it means that the writers can take us back to the place where we loved the flawed Todd Manning because he would still be struggling with his humanity and his fighting his fear of returing to the sociopath he’d once been (the sociopath TSJ’s Todd was sacrificed to become once again).

Watching Viki with Todd, even I began to long for old Todd. I remembered how instrumental a role Viki played in Todd’s redepmtion and how much closer to human she made him. The few minutes of Viki with the RHTodd’s (the Todd who was allowed to experience human emotions) made me “homesick” and sad that the writers had wasted the gifts that TST brought to the role at the same time. There is something special in RH’s Todd’s relationship with Viki that TSJ’s Todd was never allowed to capture. I felt like an intruder watching Viki watch her baby brother (RH Todd) sleep. The moment felt so real and I could only imagine that in fictional Viki’s shoes that I, too, would long for the brother with a familiar face, a familiar sound and familiar mannerisms.

I get it, because as much as I’ve loved TSJ in the role and for as much as I hope there is a way to bring him back, afterall, I can see the emtional threads of this storyline braiding themselves together to give fans the Todd they’d hoped they would get with TSJ and were disappointed when the writers had other plans. EZ’s Viki and RH’s Todd have the opportunity to bring viewers back to what feels like ‘home’.

Initially, this storyline led me to imagine the Emmy worthy work Erika Slezak would deliver as the emotional heart of the Lord family, torn between two brothers who want to be loved best by her – one who now had everything and one who’d pretty much lost it all. Both brothers would be fearful of being rejected in favor of the other. I thought of the stress and pain it would cause Viki to constantly be asked to choose between them, as it has caused her the same gutwrenching pain she experiences even still with her daughters. Ithought of the comic moments with the two sets of long lost Lord twins, RH-Todd and his favorite, Jess. TSJ -Todd becoming Natalies’s champion. In the end, while both Todds are familiar to Viki, both would be strangers. Now it’s becoming clearer that the writers are going to make a ‘choice’ themselves, and I’m resigned to the fact that their choice won’t be mine and TSJ won’t be back. More is the pity.

Ultimately, it must be hell to work for an ABC soap in a familiar role. From the return of the “Real Greenlee” to the return of RH’s Todd, any actor would probably be smart to consider themselves just a temporary long-term replacement in any ABC soap role.

Oh, OLTL writers. Why wait until AFTER the show is cancelled to write a compelling set of plots!?!?! We have two key pieces of information that help put the T/T2 storyline in broader perspective, I think. The first is the unaired woman’s face, head of a secret organization which held Todd (or Todd2) prisoner. The second is Viki looking over the picture of Todd/Todd2’s mother, Irene — nice touch!

Speculation time: Irene and the heartless head of the spy organization one in the same person.

Was Irene a plant, sent in from this secret spy organization to get close to Victor Lord? Was she a dangerous spy of some sort who was supposed to uncover Victor’s coldwar dirt (to whom was he selling secrets/weapons/etc) and then meant to kill him? Did the organization fake her death when her mission was over and allowed her to recover one of her sons only to send him off somewhere safe when she realized that a child was in the way of her ambition to rise to power in the agency? Did she plan to bring the unknown twin in to replace the known twin (Todd), who is obviously a bitter failure in her book since he couldn’t be controlled?

Of course, a complete and utter indifference would explain why she didn’t care that her brother subjected one of her sons to incredible torture during his childhood and why she never intervened to help Todd as he careened out of control in his young adulthood. In hindsight, it benefitted her. She later realized that she needed a sociopathic cold-blooded killer she could trust or at least control, someone linked to her. It’s exactly what she thought one of her sons became. Thanks to her brother’s cruelty, Todd had learned to not care about others and to inflict pain without remorse. The trouble with him would have been the fact that he doesn’t take orders, and that he felt no allegiance to anyone – not even his believed dead mother. Allowing the other twin to be beaten, tortured and brainwashed in her own agency made Todd1’s failure to become her puppet immaterial. She could create the cold-blooded killer-superagent she needed in Todd2.

Oh yes, I’m intrigued, OLTL writers, and enough so that I forgive you for creating yet another set of mystery twins in the Lord family and hope that the execution of the Todd-Todd2 storyline is far more successful than the mind numbing Jessica/Tess/Hot Messica-Natalie storyline. I’m even willing to pretend that the other twin pair doesn’t exist at all! Yeah, Todd and Todd2 are just that interesting. By the way, does this now mean that Todd1 has to split his inheritance with Todd2? Now THAT is going to be the place where these brothers part company!

Destiny – Nora: The mother of all showdowns?

Love or hate her, the one consistency about Nora is that when it comes to the law, she’s willing to do what she can to help those she cares about and believes in escape what she thinks of as an unfair prosecution. When it comes to her children? There is no such thing. Hell hath no fury! The Ford Brother (whichever one it is, they’re all the same to me) only escaped having Nora give him a proctology exam like no other because he had something to trade, his freedom for Matthews’.

As much as Nora loves Destiny, is there anyone who doesn’t believe that if the writers are consistent, Nora will take young Destiny to court to prevent her from aborting Matthew’s child if she doesn’t decide on her own to keep it? I can’t see Nora talking Destiny into keeping this baby if her own mother wasn’t able to, and I can’t see Nora sitting idly by while Destiny makes this decision. I could see Nora on one side, Bo in the middle and Destiny and her mother fighting for her right to not have to keep a child she’s not ready to raise on her own, or even with the help of the Buchanans.

Whatever the decision, I hope it’s Destiny’s to make and I hope she can handle the consequences. If true the form, the writers will have Matthew wake up and remember Dani alone, and his great love for her. Destiny’s face won’t ring any bells for him. He won’t feel close to her or her child (should she decide to keep it). If Destiny decides not to keep the baby, I can see Matthew waking up, again in love with Dani, and having the poor girl feel twice as lonely and in despair — no child, no Matthew, just heartache. Either way it rolls, insanity is in Destiny’s future — because women in daytime go crazy without the love of the objects of their affection. I think it’s a rule, or just a misogynistic wish on all soap writers’ parts.

Done, Finito, KAPUT! I’m done trying to find a reason to like the BnB’s Steffy Forrester, DONE! I usually love bad girls/bad boys in daytime; although I almost always root against them. I enjoy watching them unleash fresh hell on others, and later themselves as their plans backfire. It’s the best of both worlds. Truly great bad girl/guy characters feed your light and dark sides. Most daytime writers have a tried and true formula and “get” what makes bad girl/boy characters so much fun. They’re equal parts exhilaration and exasperation and just when you think you can’t love-to- hate them any more than you already do, the writers pull a twist. The character you thought you knew, the character whose all-knowing smirks drove you to the brink of distraction suddenly has a vulnerable side. You find yourself almostliking them! When daytime writers want you to fall for a character, they know what it takes to make you fall hard:

AMC’s writers pulled the ’empathy card’ on Janet-from-another-planet Green when they revealed that she wasn’t simply pathologically jealous of her beautiful sister, Natalie Marlowe, but that she’d been the target of unrelenting taunting and teasing, merciless emotional abuse, all without remorse by a mother who felt justified in the emotional torture of her daughter. Natalie was her blessing, Janet was her curse. Wilma Marlowe couldn’t wait to remind Janet, every day of her life, that she was the daughter she would have done without and when given the choice, that choice would always be the beloved Natalie. Janet’s hope was to, just once, be chosen first. The desire to be someone’s first choice – even Trevor Dillon’s, drove much of Janet’s continued march toward madness.

ATWT’s writers pulled the ’empathy card’ with Emily Stewart, who spent years dealing with her mother Susan’s substance abuse and emotional distancing. Emily’s victimization at her mother’s hands turned into a worldview in which she was always the victim of the those around her – even as she drew first blood. By soapgod, she was going to make the world PAY! ATWT pulled the double whammy with heartless schemer, Angel Lange, who was the victim of longterm sexual abuse at the hands of her wealthy powerful father. Angel’s scheming was directed at helping her secure her freedom from a powerful father who seemed unstoppable. To that end she forced Holden Snyder into marriage, schemed to keep him, and with her brother, stole millions from their father’s company.

GH’s Stefan Cassadine’s ’empathy card’ came in the form of dysfunctional parenting as well. He and brother Stavros were presented as the “Heir and a Spare”. While his parents groomed his brother for greatness (and you can read that as great darkness), he was expected to bask in the shaded glory of the pathological Stavros, accept the cast off crumbs of his parents’ affections. It was a wonder that they allowed him to keep the Cassadine name. Stavros was dangerous, but even Stavros was a kitten compared to their parents.

Stefan never stood a chance growing up. If it’s possible to assign behavior to soap characters, you could imagine that had Stefan’s parents paid more attention to him in his youth, there would be no need to discuss adult Stefan. He’d have never nade it to adulthood.

Long before Stefan, there was Bobbie Spencer, who curiously enough became Stefan’s wife. In her youth, Bobbie hadn’t met a man she didn’t want to control, nor a woman she didn’t want to destroy to have him. We later learned that Nurse Bobbie’s early trauma occurred when she was led into prostitution as a young teen by her Aunt Ruby, not long after her parents died. She was just another of the working girls in Aunt Ruby’s house. Bobbie’s “protector” was her older brother, Luke, who protected her by making sure she was ‘safe’ on her ‘dates’ with older men. Bobbie was reminded of her sex worker past, frequently, even as she transitioned from good-girl-gone-bad to bad-girl-turned-real-woman. The most lasting reminder of Bobbie’s difficult time was the arrival of the daughter she conceived while working for Aunt Ruby. Unfortuntately for Bobbie, daughter Carly came with an eye on vengence.

OLTL’s Todd Manning, in his youth, was anger on a stick and a threat to the safety of women everywhere. The writers should have taken advantage of the fact that in a field of characters with unusual names (Storm, Ridge, Thorne, Destiny) naming this guy “Trouble” instead of Todd would have been more honest. If there was a thing that Todd didn’t hate, it was only because it hadn’t been invented yet. It’s hard to feel sorry for a unrepentent rapist and the writers knew it. Without the need to try to ‘redeem’ him, the writers allowed the audience catch a glimpse of what was left of the humanity of the character. The idea seemed to be to provide the audience some hope that whatever was left of his humanity was enought to stop him from victimizing others and to begin dealing with his own pain. Todd’s pain resulted from frequent beatings by an uncaring father who despised him. Todd’s father, Peter Manning, was his maternal uncle and adoptive father. He was forced to raise the child as his own. We later found out that Todd was also sexually abused in his youth.

BnB’s Stephanie Douglas Forrester (who moved from my love-to-hate column to fully despise) was the product of a vicious wealthy father who presented the image of a perfect family to his business colleagues and friends (including fellow industry titan, YnR’s Katherine Chancellor). What his friends and and colleagues didn’t know is that Mr. Douglas beat his daughter “Stevie” with reckless abandon behind closed doors. Stephanie’s cruel childhood treatment was reportedly the cause of the cruelty she expressed in adulthood. It is something that others around her struggle with until this day — clearly Stepahnie doesn’t struggle with her inhumanity toward others. She revels in it.

You get the common thread, yes? Years of emotional, physical, verbal, and sexual abuse. Whether it happens because of a cowardly parent or a craven lover, there is typically a foundation for the abusive, shallow behavior we witness in our fave bad girls and boys. Use that as a backdrop to try to understand the BnB’s Steffy Forrester. She’s the heir to a massive fortune, her mother came BACK from the dead and re-established the family Steffy always wanted. Her mother also gave her 25% of the family company – trusting her to “take care” of her older brother. Steffywas raised by a father she adores. She’s never had to go to college and yet was handed cushy executive level positions in the company after spending only a few months in the mailroom. AND she had a stepmother who raised her and loved her while her mother was believed to have been in the grave (the same stepmother she still adored just a few years, ago, and with whom she’s had no significant conflict). She’s traveled the world and has reportedly been loved and in love.

To hear this wanker of a character whine day in and day out about how sad she is, how much she needs a man (any man dating or married to a Logan woman), how hard her life is, how she’s been abandoned, maltreated, unloved… it’s all just too much. Rather than creating feelings that run from exhilaration to exasperation, my feelings for Steffy run from damned bored to seriously annoyed. Her rapid shifting from begging her daddy (Ridge) to staywith the family and continue to raise her, to begging her ‘big daddy’ (Bill Spencer) to stay with her for the night and make love to her is pathetic, but mostly jarring. Is she a needy child or a sexually provocative woman? She can’t be both, or use both “needs” as the foundation for her aggression toward the Logan family. Her need to destroy the Logan family because her father loves Brooke, is petty. It’s surreal at best when you consider how much she loved Brooke as a stepmother, until her nological mother’s return. It’s absurd when you consider the fact that Brooke is the mother of her youngest brother.

Steffy doesn’t work as a bad girl because there is no “empathy card” to be played for this character. The character is made up of all hard angles. It’s even hard to believe that she’s invested in the people she claims to be invested in. She’s now twice turned on her mother for love of two different men (Rick Forrester and Bill Spencer). She’s never bothered to share the stock in the family company with her brother. She doesn’t care if her YOUNGEST brother (still in late childhood) grows up without a father – as long as their father is in the home she no longer lives in as an adult. She’s been working to destroy her brother’s family since he was a toddler. She fell to her knees over twin sister Phoebe’s death, but almost immediately fell into bed with the man her family blamed for her sister’s death. She defended him even after he used her and used her sister’s death to taunt her father… the same father she can’t live without.

The fact that anyone (onscreen) finds her intriguing leaves one feeling dumbfounded. Steffy Marone-Forrester is a character filled with contradictions, and none of them good.

She is not likable.

She is not rootworthy.

She is not interesting.

My time is quickly becoming wasted by this character. My sincere hope is that the writers are planning to give the character depth or to send her packing. I will accept either, but what I can’t accept is Steffy in her current incarnation. At some point the writers will become bored with this character as she is. I’m looking forward to THAT day.

Most of you have heard or read, by now, that U.S. soaps are one step closer to being a part of our American past. I have been saying for some time that I wish that the powers that be (TPTB) at the networks would either fix daytime or kill it off, but that anything in between is unfair to fans, and a clear disrespect for the genre. I am not celebrating the loss of All My Children and One Life To Live. In fact, it saddens me for two reasons. The first is that I believe that both shows were a damned sight better than General Hospital and were far more ‘history rich’ in their current forms than GH. The second is that I believe that both shows could have lasted years longer if ABC had the courage to infuse the genre with new writers and executive producers/energetic writers and executive producers who would have respected the genre’s history, but not become bogged down in the repetitive storyline telling, and the lack of attention to detail that drove fans away.

AMC and OLTL were the ‘class acts’ of daytime, and to lose these two shows won’t improve the chances of the remaining shows to survive by picking up their audiences. The loss of these two shows will only serve to illuminate how much weaker the plots and plot devices of the remaining shows are.

The Young and the Restless: The actress replacing Drucilla (whose name I’m not even motivated to look up) once gave an interview stating that most Drucilla fans were fans of the show first, not of the character. Uh… ok. She also stated that she wasn’t hired to create a character to replace Dru… and how’s that workin’ for ya? Where is the character she plays now? In Dru’s old storyline… pregnant, by one of the Winters brothers and she’s not exactly sure which. Adam, who burned a fetus in a damned fireplace, never giving its mother the chance to grieve its loss is a romantic hero, involved with a woman whose child he stole. Go. AWAY!

The Bold and the Beautiful: Where to begin? There are so many problems with this show that between it and DOOL, that either could be the next to go (yeah, even over GH)! I wish Bell’s ‘bad girls’ weren’t so one-dimensional, like Steffy and her faux ‘good girl’ mother, Taylor- who is as much a daytime bitch as ever there was one. Both Steffy and Taylor highlight the weakness of Bell’s writing for bad girl characters. I miss the real bad girls, women with a method to their madness and whose actions were explained through their backstory (pain, unhappiness, abuse, abandonment). You always knew that their desperate actions were about fighting back in the only way they knew how and it left you hating them and loving them at the same time. Steffy is just a selfish, pampered, snotty little girl who thinks life owes it to her to give her whatever she wants – even after having such a privileged life and a father who sacrificed his happiness for hers.

Her constant attempt to draw a distinction between herself and the ‘human trash from the valley’ makes her as useless as her grandmother. Most soap bad girls didn’t offer the social class argument for their superiority and since social class is the only type of class Steffy has – any argument she makes in her favor is moot. She is everything she despises in others… the ultimate hypocrite.

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Steffy’s character lacks depth and a backstory gives definition to her character.

She’s just mean, nasty, and whiny-bitchy instead of fun bitchy. It’s this sort of anemic storytelling that’s killed so much of daytime and makes the genre unwatchable.

Days Of Our Lives: Rape is NOT SEXY! EJ? NOT SEXY! I don’t care how attractive EJ’s portrayer James Scott is. JS is not EJ, and EJ is a rapist with no redeeming qualities. His sole mission in life it to own and manipulate the woman he raped, to control her life and to continue to impregnate her through violence and/or deceit. I gave up on this show a very long time ago. DOOL, and EJ as a character, are better suited to a soap titled, “The Land that Time Forgot”. The titled references a book, screenplay, and several movies. Why not a soap? Women are smarter, better educated, focused on informing themselves and their daughters and sons about sexual assault — yet, sexual assault is still the foundation for romance and ‘good times’ on Days of our Lives. Not. good.

General Hospital: Need I say more? Nice guys really DO finish last. OLTL and AMC focused on family ties, the ups and downs of relationships, and in the end the mob boys and weak guest appearances win out. Sorry, James Franco fans, I thought GH’s artist Franco sucked and that the actor treated the character as a caricature. His vision of what a soap character was supposed to be left me cringing and I was shocked that TPTB backstage allowed it to happen.

Daytime writers and executives of the four remaining shows have to become more protective of the genre. They have to remember daytime’s illustrious history and send the remaining four shows out as a bright flame, and not sending it up as a weak puff of smoke. They owe the fans no less.

Oddly enough, I was a daytime fan who, when this blog began as a column for Darcy Fourier’s “The Soapscope” website, watched more daytime than primetime television. My primetime viewership was nearly non-existent. When I became disenchanted with daytime, I switched to primetime viewership almost exclusively. Even still, I will miss soaps for lots of reasons, but primarily for their history in total. I can’t say that I will soaps in their current incarnation, I hated and still hate most of what’s airing in daytime. I will miss daytime for what it was, and for the missed opportunity to make it something great, again. I’m not interesting in more daytime talk, more scripted reality, or more game shows and can’t imagine their appeal over even the worst of daytime dramas, much less the best of it. To the Cast and Crew at All My Children and One Life to Live, thank you for the decades of memories. You are irreplaceable and you will be missed.

For AMC? A teeny bit. It’s rebounding from a long and painful period in its history. Given the three ABC soaps, AMC has the most potential for a return to creative grandeur. The show has done a much better job of focusing on legacy character and its core (although that’s easier to do when your core is smaller than in the past). The pacing is good, the storyline telling is stronger, and the show has been more visually appealing lately. I’m rooting for this show.

For OLTL? OH HELL YES! Here’s a word of advice, writers. I don’t know if you feel that you’ve been sold out by the ‘house of mouse’ knowing that feeder network Soapnet is going to be shuttered for a ‘Disney Jr.’ channel, but come on! I can’t tell if your current storylines are a reaction meant to save OLTL by creating a new ‘DeGrassi’ (and a far less interesting version at that) to shift over to teen Disney or if you want to thumb your noses at your bosses by mocking their youth entertainment obsession. If I see Starr, the two new guys that I can’t tell apart unless they’re in scene with their respective Manning sister, Cole, Matthew, Hannah, and anyone else under the age of 21, I’m going to need a bag to catch my lunch on its way back out — sorry, the reference clearly shows that I’m regressing in maturity along with the storylines on OLTL.

GH? Hell yes, and OH HELL YES those ratings are deserved. Is there anything on GH that isn’t tied to the mob storyline any more? I roll my eyes so much on the rare occasions I watch that I can’t tell. Dante has to ‘pay’ for being a good cop and doing the right thing. Tough as nails Claire is now a mob apologist who sees the difference between criminals like Franco and criminals like Jason/Sonny. Nikolas is creepy, stalkerish, and trying to force a pregnant Liz to accept his lust-called-love for her. Every other chance at romance on this show is shuttered in favor or more whining by pampered ill tempered mobsters and the children they’ve ruined. The one potential for growth and the writers have ruined even that:

Speaking of ruined, I’ve defended Patrick in the past. He’s the motherless son of an alcoholic father who watched his family slowly fall apart. To say he has issues is an understatement. The problem is that Patrick’s ‘jealousy’ over Lisa and Steven, and his constant whining about Robin’s need for helping others is just wearing thin. Have I lost my passion for Scrubs? No, I’ve lost my passion for GH because of their treatment of Scrubs. With clever writing, Lisa could be an interesting double crossing villain, the actress could easily carry it off, and I would have loved watching Robin rip her a new one. Without clever writing, the character is just annoying. The idea that Patrick, who has spent every day before Lisa’s arrival telling Robin how much he loves his life and that he wouldn’t trade it for the world, now cries (boo friggin’ hoo) over driving a mini van and being home at night. He cries to Luke of all people — the man who has betrayed every moment he’s ever spent with a family who loved and idolized him (when GH writers destroy fans’ fond memories of GH couples, they go big! I feel for you Luke and Laura fans.)

REALLY writers? REALLY? We’re supposed to want to see Patrick moon over a woman who feeds him what he wants to hear and sticks a knife in his back when he turns around? We’re supposed to feel for him because his wife and child just aren’t enough? GH has missed it’s calling. If the mouse network decides to finally pull the plug and put all of us out of our misery, they could consider shopping this show over at Spike TV – “the network for men”. This show is such a rancid male fantasy that I can’t believe that women on the show are actually permitted to wear clothing.

Hannah attempts an overdose after Ford dumps her – this storyline should have been further developed. Despite its origin, it actually has redeeming social value. So it won’t surprise you that instead the writers seem determine to create a Starr-Cole-Hannah triangle just weeks after Hannah’s suicide attempt:

DAYS’ above board top cop Hope Brady decides to terrorize the men of Salem to make up for the fact that she’s been hurt and tossed aside one too many times – of course she’s under the influence of drugs. (Ignore the part where Sami is overly concerned about her rapist – repulsive, I know):

BnB’s Stephanie Forrester can’t stand the fact that Eric has never gotten over Brooke (er, long before he married Brooke’s sister) – jealousy is apparently synonymous with being homicidal in Bell’s ficitionalized L.A.:

To think… one of the first times Eric dumped Steph, she had a mini-stroke, lost her memory, and lived on the streets using Brooke’s mother’s name… Liz… yes, the same ‘Liz’ (Beth) whose death she’s now implicated in.

Way to go turning all that hatred outward, sister… if only the writers would either let Steph seek help and be cured OR be incarcerated. I’ll take either.

This one is a double feature! Stacy Haiduk as AMC’s Hannah Nichols (who may as well give up her life to save the man who didn’t want her, right? Hannah’s death follows what seemed to be an endless stream of mischief and mayhem when Zack refused to allow her to have his child, to replace the adult son they’d lost. It’s even weirder because he later became the donor for his wife’s sister, Bianca, and Bianca’s fiancee Reese – without telling his own wife of course. Where’s the fun in that? He’s not exactly protective with the seed. The man was giving his seed away… to everyone but Hannah that is… who then gave her life for him… see the circular thing going on here? Hannah should have either taken him over the edge with her, on sent him in her place.

Shortly after Hannah’s death, Haiduk re-appears in the form of YnR’s Patty Williams. Patty had her face surgically altered to look like her psychiatrist. Why? To get into bed with the man who married and then betrayed her, causing her to have an accident and miscarriage decades earlier. Those crazy romantic writers of daytime. Man do they understand a woman’s heart!:

Hannah:

Patty:

Doesn’t every woman lose it when the man who cheated on her and even cheated with his father’s wife, marries another woman?

Patty becomes Emily and then returns to being Patty, who becomes Emily again – oh yeah, you read that right!:

The ultimate classic love starved psycho on the loose! The YnR’s/BnB’s Sheila Carter:

Does this blog really need a closing statment? I think I’ve made my point.